Monday 22 May 2017

Einstein's 'Time' Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [4]

Gribbin (1990: 191):
But the reality is a photon track in space-time, linking my eye, perhaps with the Pole Star.  There is no real movement of time that sees a track developing from the star to my eye; that is just my perception from my viewpoint.  Another equally valid viewpoint sees that track as an eternal feature around which the universe changes, and during those changes in the universe one of the things that happens is that my eye and the Pole Star happen to be at opposite ends of the track.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, (the perception of) the movement of a photon from the Pole Star to an eye on Earth is a construal of experience as meaning.  The notion of a 'movement of time' is inconsistent with the construal of time in Physics as a dimension like space — since there is no analogous movement of space.

The "equally valid" viewpoint is invalid on several fronts, largely because it confuses the "non-unfolding" in time of a photon as process (analogous to the "non-ticking" of a hypothetical clock moving at light speed) with the unfolding in time of the locomotion process of the photon from the Pole Star to an eye (analogous to the movement of a hypothetical clock through space at light speed).

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